An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  If Jean was private about her deep depressions, she was just as private about her relationship with Robert. "All of us were a bit envious," Edith wrote, "I for one had admired him from a distance. His precocity and brilliance already legend, he walked his jerky walk . . . with his blue eyes and wild Einstein hair."233 Edith was also a friend of Mary Ellen Washburn, and between Jean and Mary Ellen— and the increasingly frequent gatherings at the Washburn house about the war in Spain—Edith came to know Robert well enough to call him "Oppie."

  Poetry had always been a way for Jean to express her most profound yearnings. At Berkeley, Robert was learning to read the 700 verses of the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita, in the original Sanskrit. As a girl, Jean had copied long stanzas from her favorite works. Now, the two read together. Jean confided in him, and he in her. They discussed her depressions, and he struggled to help her understand them. He knew how demons filled the mind with dread and fear and worse, hopelessness. He did not discount the pain he knew she was enduring, a form of torture that distorted and twisted all of life until all that mattered was a way to escape. He had, that time in Brittany, thought about suicide. But his terror had dissipated; he had come through intact. He could not believe that someone as loving and yearning and good as Jean could not be rescued.

  Robert was a fine man, she knew. As she had written several years prior: "Had I a man, I should give myself to whatever that is. I can easily imagine becoming drunk over his body and more over his delight in mine. He could have all that and whatever of the rest of me he could find. I imagine, were he a fine man he could make something out of me."234

  They talked of marriage, but she hesitated.235

  He asked again, and she refused.

  Jean had watched her mother bend her life to accommodate her father. Even at the end, John had held on to Marjorie, made demands, had not allowed her to go easily to her death. Her father clearly needed a woman to anchor his life. (He would, in fact, marry their old friend Elizabeth Whitney at the end of September. Jean would have had to wonder how this late marriage would work out; she admired Elizabeth as a Jungian psychiatrist and must have assumed she knew what she was doing. Certainly it would relieve the pressure on Jean to offer emotional support to her father.)

  Would it be any different with Robert, who was already a star in the academic firmament and thinking about marriage and family? Twice they had come close to declaring themselves engaged. But how was it possible to think of fulfilling his needs, of becoming a mother and caring for children?

  Sometime that year she told him she could not marry him. Not now. There was no sharp break, no dramatic end. They remained close—to each other and to many of the same people—Bernfeld, the Peters, Mary Ellen, and Thomas Addis. They cared too much for each other to stay far apart. Most of their circle still considered Jean his "sweetheart," not knowing exactly where the relationship stood, and Robert and Jean were silent. When he started to see other women, it seemed obvious that it was with Jean's understanding.

  NEW YORK HADN'T TURNED UP anything to occupy Kitty, and she couldn't stay at the Nelsons much longer, so she made her way to Philadelphia to see Zelma— also known as "Bake." It is likely that Zelma urged Kitty to finish her bachelor's degree, as Kitty enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania for the spring semester. She would graduate in June, and go straight into graduate school—if she could find a way to support herself. She complained that her parents had said it was difficult to send money out of England.

  Bake was on the staff of the Cancer Research Laboratories at Penn's Graduate School of Medicine. She had introduced Kitty and Joe, and it was likely she also introduced Kitty to a colleague visiting from California236 named Stewart Harrison. A medical doctor also in cancer research, he happened to be a good-looking British bachelor as well.

  Harrison's degrees, both undergraduate and medical, were from Oxford. He wasn't a Communist. He wasn't homosexual or a drug addict. Harrison wasn't Joe, she would tell her friends; she would never stop loving Joe. She was, however, twenty-eight, and alone.

  Harrison quickly proposed. Kitty accepted but with a proviso: she would need to stay at Penn long enough to finish her bachelor's degree, which meant that Harrison would have to be in California without her for the first six months of their marriage. And when she joined him, she intended to begin graduate work in botany at the University of California at Los Angeles. Harrison agreed to it all.

  In November of 1938, one year and one month after Joe's death, Kitty married Richard Stewart Harrison in Philadelphia. Soon after, he made the train journey across the country alone to California and his research at the California Institute of Technology.

  RUTH'S AND VAL'S LIVES MOVED along apace, back and forth through the garden gate that connected their homes. Both had demanding jobs; when at home Val tended her roses and Ruth entertained; they visited their families and friends in Berkeley. Ruth had worked at the Federal Relief Administration from 1934 to 1936, attempting to apply new principles of behavioral psychology. By 1937, she had completed her dissertation, and chose to continue working, part-time, for Los Angeles County as a senior psychological examiner for the County Probation Department. Even part-time, the work was challenging.

  KITTY ARRIVED IN CALIFORNIA FROM Philadelphia. She and Harrison had been married ten months and separated for six of them. It had taken her nine years to get her bachelor's degree, but at last she was enrolled at UCLA's graduate school—on her way, she said, to a Ph.D. Her life seemed like a series of interruptions and the party they were going to the night of her arrival in California might have seemed like just one more. Harrison was popular, and his Caltech friends wanted to meet the woman who was lucky enough to catch him. Tall and handsome in his summer whites, his dark hair carefully trimmed, Harrison was eager to introduce his bride.

  The party was in the Lauritsen garden. For the past three years, Harrison had worked with Charles Lauritsen in Caltech's high voltage X-ray lab which, when it wasn't being used in physics research, was available for the experimental treatment of cancer. Charlie or his wife Sigrid welcomed Kitty and Harrison, made sure they had drinks, and began the introductions. Kitty was twenty-nine years old that August, small and vivid, not beautiful in any usual way, but engaging and confident. Her eyes were dark and expressive and she laughed easily—there was nothing coy or timid about her. She was the kind of woman whose appeal could never be explained by a photograph. Men were drawn to her; if some of their wives were hesitant, it was because they couldn't quite tell who Kitty was, where she fit.

  "Meet the new Mrs. Harrison," someone would have said, then the conversation would have turned back to Europe and war. Talk would have been tinged with a sense of dread. Most of the academics at the party had studied in Europe, many of them in Germany. A few, like Robert Oppenheimer, were Jews and were anxious about their relatives.

  It was late in the summer of 1939. On August 23, the Soviets signed a nonaggression pact with the Nazis, removing for Hitler the threat of a Russian attack on his Eastern Front. On September 1, Hitler would invade Poland and three days later, Britain and France would declare war on Germany. The Republicans in Spain were finished; Franco—with the backing of Hitler and Mussolini—would emerge the victor and the Fascists would be in command.

  The Tolmans were at the party. Ruth would have engaged Harrison's young bride with her usual warmth. Others would have sought out Richard, as a veteran of the First World War, to hear his thoughts. The guests were scientists, influenced by facts more than hopes, and the facts coming out of Germany told them the atmosphere there was poisoned.

  Kitty could describe Germany. How she found "Heil Hitler this, and Heil Hitler that," and the dirty looks she got when she refused to respond. She could explain that she had been visiting family in Germany all of her life, and how now everyone suspects everyone else. (She would not have revealed that she had family connections to Hitler's top generals.)

  Harrison would have been the one who pointed Robert out to Kitty, w
hispered that he was already something of a legend in the field of physics. Kitty, moth to flame, could see for herself: Robert holding a cigarette and waving it ever so slightly as he spoke. His soft speech, the effect he had on the others. How he was "interested in almost anything you could think of. His mere physical appearance, his voice, and his manners made people fall in love with him—male, female, almost everybody . . . He was terrifically attractive."237

  By the time she left the party that summer evening, Kitty Harrison wanted Robert Oppenheimer.

  16

  ECHOES OF WAR RUMBLE OVER BOTH COASTS, RUTH MAKES A DECISION, JEAN FINDS HER VOCATION, AND KITTY CHALLENGES THE SANGRE DE CRISTOS

  The year 1939 marked the end of one grim decade and 1940, the beginning of an even more tortuous one. Roosevelt had begun to prepare the United States for war. For those whose lives intersected most intimately with Robert Oppenheimer's, some changes were abrupt, others came so quietly they were noticed only in retrospect.

  Robert continued to make the monthly drive between Pasadena and Berkeley, and in the summer to New Mexico and Perro Caliente, where he exchanged the car for a horse named Crisis. The mainstays gathered there as well: Frank and Jackie, and Bob and Charlotte, who made the long drive out from Illinois in both 1939 and 1940. An assortment of other friends also came for shorter periods.

  Jean, who loved riding and mountains and mystery, seems never to have been part of the gathering because of the demands of medical school. Jean's father's marriage to family friend Elizabeth Whitney did not last long. In a letter to Hugh, who was concerned about his father's health, Whitney attempted to explain that she felt his father's symptoms—exhaustion and the feeling that he could not work productively—stemmed from his need to find lost elements in himself through a woman—friend, sister, daughter, wife. "He cannot bear to live alone," she wrote. He had refused to go into deep therapy to find a fresh source of energy within himself, which she had urged.238 And though she didn't spell it out, it was clear that she didn't choose to become an acquiescent wife. Her erstwhile stepdaughter, who had neither the time nor the inclination to tend to her father, would have seen this failed marriage between her father and her mother's good friend as a cautionary tale.

  IN 1940 RICHARD TOLMAN RETURNED to government service. Soon he was traveling across the country to Washington, D.C., meeting with James Conant, president of Harvard and chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, and Vannevar Bush, a former MIT professor and current president of the Carnegie Institution. Ruth would sometimes see Richard off on the Super Chief out of Los Angeles on the four-day trip to Washington, D.C. If he was needed urgently, Richard would fly American Airlines and be there within sixteen hours. Ruth carried on at home with her terrier named Tim (Nitz's successor), her work and her friends. She wrote Richard loving letters, told him she was always lonely without him. Both knew that their comfortable world of garden parties, pure research and stammtisches was coming to an end.

  KITTY AND STEWART HARRISON'S APARTMENT at 553½ South Coronado Street was not far from downtown Los Angeles, and almost equidistant from the new University of California, Los Angeles campus to the west, and Caltech to the north. Kitty enrolled at UCLA as Katherine Stewart Harrison, and she said she was exempt from paying the registration fee because her father could not send her money from England. Kitty intended for UCLA to be her path to the doctorate that would make her one of the exceptional women, like her friend Bake and like Ruth. It would also put her on par with Robert Oppenheimer's "sweetheart" in San Francisco, a medical doctor on her way to becoming a psychiatrist.

  LATE IN 1939, RUTH BENEDICT and Nat Raymond's relationship was sputtering. Nat had spent much of the 1930s living with Benedict in New York, and now left the country, exuberant with a new idea to become a travel guidebook writer. Benedict traveled west to stay with her mother in Pasadena while waiting to see if her brother and his wife had managed to get on a freighter out of Europe. With the war declared, Americans were scrambling to return on any ship that would take them.

  Later that month, Benedict visited old friends in Berkeley and spent some time at the university. She wrote to Margaret Mead that she had met Nat's good friend Ruth Valentine, that they had much in common—they had both gone to Vassar—and that they had driven back south "along the magnificent coast drive that is new since I lived out here—down through the Robinson Jeffers country— and that was something I'd always wanted to do. It was magnificent."239

  The next month, Benedict would write to Mead that she was staying at Val's, and was part of a new group, one that included Ruth Tolman: "It's been a great pleasure. . . . Wednesday nights some eight or ten highly selected men and their wives have dinner together that they call the Stamtisch; they're liberal and are most of them Cal Tech faculty but there is a psychoanalyst, etc. I've met some people there I enjoy." Benedict wrote on, "I'm very happy living with Val . . . She's spent her life picking up the pieces of a disappointed and violent family; she's been tied to it, and she's never taken life into her own hands and planned for herself. Now the last one of the family is dead—three have died in the last two years—and it's meant everything to her that I've been here."240

  She would stay for four months, not leaving Val's home until April 1940.

  THERE IS NO RECORD OF who made the first move, of when Kitty and Robert first saw each other after they'd met in the Lauritsens' garden. The fall semester in Berkeley started in mid-August, taking Robert north until he returned to attend the requisite monthly meeting at Caltech.

  With the wives of his friends and colleagues, Robert had earned a reputation. Ten years earlier, he had taken Ava Helen Pauling's flirtation as an invitation to a tryst, and acted without regard for her husband. The year before, in 1928, also in Pasadena, Robert had attempted to romance Helen Campbell, who at the time was engaged to marry Sam Allison, a colleague of Robert's at Berkeley. Helen admitted that before her engagement, she had found herself attracted to Robert, but decided that he had an eye for women, even married ones, "and that his attentions to her should not be taken too seriously." She added that she thought he was drawn to "slightly discontented women and seemed specially sensitive to lesbianism."241 Since Jean, he had been dating a number of women in San Francisco, none of them seriously. And there was no reason to believe he was serious about Kitty Harrison either.

  Kitty had no doubts about her sexuality, and shared Robert's lack of compunction about allowing marriage or friendship to interfere with what she wanted. (Especially if what she wanted was more permanent than what he had in mind—she told a friend that she had "set her hat for him. . . . and did it the old fashioned way, got pregnant. And Robert was just innocent enough to fall for it.")She was soon seen happily enthroned on the passenger seat of Robert's big car. They had only to be seen together more than once for the gossip to begin in academic circles. Robert would remember that time as a "highly charged passionate falling in love"— something never easy to hide.242

  For most of that year, Kitty remained at UCLA and continued to live with Harrison. Later, she would tell one of the Tolmans' inner circle that her marriage was all wrong from the outset, that she continued to live with him only because he was concerned that a divorce would affect his reputation as a young doctor. She also stayed because she had no other place to go, and no income of her own. As the fall progressed into winter, Kitty and Robert saw each other on his monthly trips to Pasadena, and somehow, when the Christmas holidays rolled around, Kitty managed to make her way north to Berkeley—without her husband.

  The first time Robert's friend Haakon Chevalier met Kitty, "was a not altogether happy occasion," Chevalier would write. Estelle Caen* had been the last in a "string of 3, 4, 5 mostly very attractive youngish girls" Robert had dated in the last year or so, according to Chevalier, who considered his good friend "Opje" to be a paragon of fine manners. "[Estelle] with whom he had broken a short time before, was giving a holiday dinner party in her house in San Francisco for a dozen or more close f
riends . . . Being a good sport, she had also invited Opje. To everyone's consternation he appeared, very late, bringing with him, uninvited and unannounced, his new fiancée, wearing a big spread of orchids."243 Kitty was hardly Robert's "fiancée" at the time, since she was married to, and living with, Stewart Harrison.

  * * *

  * Estelle Caen, born in Sacramento, studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the Juilliard School in New York. She was an accomplished pianist and strong supporter of left-wing causes all her life. Her brother was Herb Caen, well-known San Francisco Chronicle columnist.

  If Jean was both beautiful and deeply intellectual, she could also be unsettling, removed and complicated. Kitty, in contrast, was bright and laughing and fun; she didn't think before acting, didn't anguish over "social conscience demands." Kitty elaborated on her background, hinted at her aristocratic connections. And she surprised Robert with her history in the Communist Party; she had actually been a Party member, had lived the life, had been on her way to the war in Spain when her first husband was killed in action. But it would have been her exuberance, her blatant disregard of boundaries, that especially appealed to him. He described her as "golden."244

  As his brother Frank pointed out: "In fact one of the most important characteristics of my brother . . . involves the way in which he made people into heroes. He could like all manner of people but in liking them they became special and exceptional."245 Kitty had found the man she believed would meet all her needs: he was charming, powerful in a world she relished, clearly admired by his peers and adored by their wives. His Harvard was not Frank Ramseyer's scholarship Harvard; he did not count poverty a virtue, as Joe had; he lived a larger life than she sensed Harrison desired. And she had managed to get his attention. Now she had to find a way to keep it. Her chance would come in the summer of 1940.